Invisible Engines, Making globalization Work

This article appears in slightly different form in the January/February 2007 issue of IEEE Micro © 2007 IEEE.

Economics

This time I write about two books by economists. The first looks at the economics and winning business strategies of industries that require software platforms. The second addresses globalization.

Invisible Engines -- How Software Platforms Drive Innovation and Transform Industries by David S. Evans, Andrei Hagiu, and Richard Schmalensee (MIT, Cambridge, MA, 2006, 395pp, ISBN 0-262-05085-4, www.mitpress.mit.edu, $34.95)

The authors are experts who consult regularly with leading platform-based businesses. Evans and Schmalensee have advised Microsoft for many years, particularly about Microsoft's antitrust difficulties. Hagiu wrote a doctoral dissertation on two-sided economies -- situations in which two groups must participate (for example, auctions, which need both buyers and sellers). 

In this book the authors lay out the underlying principles and parallels of personal computers, mobile phones, video games, online auctions, search engines, and similar industries. All of these have in common that they have more than one "side." For example, the Microsoft Windows operating system creates an ecosystem of hardware manufacturers, application developers, and end users.

The various sides in the ecosystem that a software platform creates depend on each other in various ways. Hardware manufacturers need software support to maximize their performance/price ratios. Hardware manufacturers and developers need buyers for their products, while the existence of desirable products on a platform leads to more buyers. These are the well known network effects that cause some platform ecosystems to grow rapidly while others shrink and die.

The interdependence of the sides in a platform-based ecosystem is commonplace knowledge. This book, however, goes into the details. It provides brief histories of various platforms and shows how their business and pricing strategies evolved. 

The authors find that in each platform ecosystem, one side gets a better deal than the others. For example, in the Windows ecosystem, developers receive valuable tools and support for minimal cost, while buyers of Windows-based computers and software provide most of Microsoft's profits. In the video game business, on the other hand, users receive the game platforms at highly favorable prices, and the platform makers receive most of their profit from game developers. Media players (for example, Real Player or Apple Quicktime) are always free to end users, while the developers of the player software obtain their profits from content developers and distributors.

The book delves into pricing issues such as price discrimination, bundling, and charging for access versus charging for usage. The authors find, sadly, that it almost always pays the manufacturer to bundle features together, even though most buyers won't use most of what they buy. This leads to a kind of Moore's Law of software bloat: software platforms double in size roughly every two years.

The access versus usage question arises most notably in communication platforms like phones or personal digital assistants (PDAs). In theory, platform providers should charge for both, but in practice they usually charge for just one.

Interestingly, an industry rarely changes its pricing strategy as it matures. It tends to stick with the model that made it successful. An industry does, however, change its integration strategy. New platforms usually provide all sides of the ecosystem, because the network effects have not yet occurred. Later, as the ecosystem grows, the provider defines application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow outside vendors to supply alternatives to the platform provider's offerings. Microsoft Windows, for example, defines many standards to allow computer and peripheral makers, application developers, and even browser makers to complement each other's offerings. The Apple media delivery system, on the other hand, works best when all of the components (iTunes, iPod, the Apple music store, and the associated digital rights management software) come from Apple. Apple buys and resells content for this system.

As the authors discuss one platform after another, they repeatedly stress the importance of APIs and other standards that allow different sides of the platform ecosystem to innovate without entanglement with other players. We all know this, but it is interesting and useful to see the principle at work in many different platform ecologies.

The best thing about this book is the concrete detail. While the authors work hard to show the similarities between different platform-based businesses, their theories are not a procrustean bed. They discuss the quirks and odd corners of each industry and show how those quirks lead to the unique business strategies of that industry.

This is a valuable book for anyone who wants to understand or engage in a business based on a software platform. I recommend it highly. 

 

Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz (Norton, New York, NY, 2006, 384pp, ISBN 0-393-06122-1, www.wwnorton.com, $26.95)

In The World Is Flat (Micro Review, May, 2005), New York Times columnist Tom Friedman emphasized the bright side of globalization. In Globalization and Its Discontents (Norton, 2002), Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz addressed the dark side of globalization. In his latest work, Stiglitz fuses these threads. He proposes ways to correct the problems he described in his earlier work, so everyone can benefit from globalization.

Joseph Stiglitz shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his analysis of markets with asymmetric information. His research disproved many cherished assumptions that had persisted from the time of Adam Smith to the late twentieth century. In 1776, Adam Smith argued that free markets lead to efficient outcomes as if by an invisible hand. Starting with his field work in Kenya in 1969, Stiglitz accumulated the insights that led him finally to the conclusion that the invisible hand, if it ever existed, had disappeared. In its place, Stiglitz argues, government has a role in keeping free markets working. For example, free markets naturally lead to rapid flows of speculative capital into and out of developing countries. Institutions and regulations must protect those countries from the resulting instability.

By the time he received his Nobel Prize, Stiglitz had put his ideas into practice. He served as chair of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors, then as Chief Economist of the World Bank. While at the World Bank, Stiglitz went to war against the policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and its chief supporter and shareholder, the United States Treasury Department. 

Stiglitz's 2002 book Globalization and Its Discontents contends that IMF policies favored United States financial interests, while short-changing the poor nations that the IMF is supposed to help. That book was widely influential, especially after huge protests against globalization like the one at the Seattle World Trade Organization meeting in November, 1999. The book identified many problems and suggested some changes, but it didn't offer a comprehensive solution. Four years later, Stiglitz continues the story of the adverse effects of globalization, but also offers solutions to many of the problems he sees.

Stiglitz summarizes the main complaints against the current implementation of globlization:

• The rules favor the industrialized countries. The rules are so unfair that the poorest countries are worse off.
  
• Material values are more important than the environment or even life itself.
  
• Developing countries lose sovereignty over decisions that affect their citizens' welfare, thereby undermining democracy.
  
• There are many losers in both developed and developing countries.
  
• Developing countries must accept Americanization of their economies and their culture.

An issue that exemplifies several of these points is especially relevant to technology-based industries. The protection of intellectual property ensures that those who invest their time and money in writing books or developing inventions receive a reward for their efforts. Granting a time-limited monopoly to creators encourages innovation and helps to expand the body of knowledge.

In recent years, however, United States laws about intellectual property have become a drag on innovation in the software industry. In the drug industry, patent laws favor the development of minor variations of high-volume drugs rather than cures for "orphan" illnesses with low potential sales. They also keep life saving drugs out of the hands of people who need them but can't afford to pay.

In 1993, bypassing the existing World Intellectual Property Organization, the World Trade Organization adopted the TRIPs agreement (for trade-related intellectual property). This subjected developing countries to even more onerous intellectual property restrictions. The most well known example is the fight over the right of countries with high incidences of HIV AIDS to manufacture generic versions of expensive drugs for that disease. More humorous examples are attempts to enforce western patents on traditional Chinese medicine or on the medicinal use of turmeric in India.

I never advocate any particular political point of view in this column. Globalization, however, is inherently political. In laying out his program to address the problems of globalization, Stiglitz makes many statements that others might regard as politically biased. Nonetheless, Stiglitz presents a compelling, comprehensive case for his program. Like Thomas Jefferson, he believes that an informed electorate that is willing to hold its leaders accountable can solve problems like those of globalization. He hopes to help today's voters and leaders understand the issues that globalization has raised.

I won't go into Stiglitz's views further here. I recommend that you read his book for the details of his analysis and his solutions. 

Miscellaneous Books

This article appears in slightly different form in the September/October 2006 issue of IEEE Micro © 2006 IEEE.

I have covered many subjects in this column, but the majority of my reviews are of books in the fields of computer science, software, project management, and technical publication. In the last few months I have seen a large number of new works. Their subjects are interesting, and their production values make them a joy to look at and to hold.

Rather than choosing just a few from among these books, I present a larger than usual selection -- though there are many more books I wish I had time and space to review. Many of these books are from a few small publishers. I'll let you draw your own conclusions about why that is.

Interface Oriented Design by Ken Pugh (Pragmatic Bookshelf, Raleigh NC, 2006, 232pp, ISBN 0-9766940-5-0, www.pragmaticprogrammer.com, $29.95)

Ken Pugh is an experienced software developer and an award winning author. In this book he treats an important design subject that many developers, even experienced ones, fail to appreciate. 

Every introduction to object oriented programming begins by explaining the key concepts of encapsulation, polymorphism, and inheritance. Pugh shows how to use interfaces to achieve true encapsulation and polymorphism. He explores the problems that inheritance presents and shows how interfaces can sometimes provide a better alternative to inheritance.

In his book Object Oriented Software Construction (Prentice Hall, 1997), Bertrand Meyer formalized the idea of design by contract. An interface is a contract that provides explicit provisions about the preconditions for invoking a method and the conditions that should follow its return. Meyer also specifies certain implicit rules that all contracts should follow. Pugh applies design by contract throughout his book, but he focuses on only the main points, which he simplifies, in an homage to Isaac Asimov's I, Robot (Gnome, 1950), as the three laws of interfaces:

1. An interface's implementation will do what its methods say it does.
2. An interface implementation shall do no harm.
3. If an implementation is unable to perform its responsibilities, it shall notify its caller.

Interface design is not an exact science. There are many ways to achieve the same basic functionality. Meyers discusses the issues and considerations that will help you make optimal designs. Many of these, like loose coupling, are fundamental design principles. Others are specific to designing interfaces. Meyers illustrates his principles with several case studies, then looks back to summarize the patterns that they illustrate.

The chapter that I found most helpful is the one on interfaces and inheritance. Inheritance is a powerful means of developing a hierarchy of behaviors and implementations. But a hierarchy of behaviors can be inflexible and limiting. Interfaces focus on behaviors that may or may not be hierarchical. A hierarchy of implementations centralizes the code for common behaviors, but the delegation pattern can provide a way to achieve the same end for non-hierarchical interfaces.

This book will repay careful study. If you design computer programs, especially in object oriented languages, you should read it. 

Ajax Design Patterns -- Creating Web 2.0 Sites with Programming and Usability Patterns by Michael Mahemoff (O'Reilly, Sebastopol CA, 2006, 654pp, ISBN 0-596-10180-5, www.oreilly.com, $44.99)

Michael Mahemoff is a computer consultant whose academic research dealt with reusing designs in software and in user interfaces. Ajax (loosely an acronym for asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a design pattern first described early in 2005 by Jesse-James Garrett. It enables web applications (for example, Google Maps) to provide highly interactive user interfaces within browsers, without using plugins.

Ajax is not a new technology. It is simply a new way of using old technologies to design applications that run in browsers and interact with remote servers. Mahemoff has compiled and described the patterns and best practices that have grown up around this new approach. Any web application designer can benefit from reading his book.

Documenting APIs -- Writing Developer Documentation for Java APIs and SDKs by James F. Bisso and Victoria Maki (Bitzone, Richmond CA, 2006, 318pp, ISBN 0-9630021-0-4, www.bitzone.com, $49.95)

I have known and worked with the authors of this book for many years. Jim Bisso is a software engineer at Sun. Viki Maki is a technical writer and trainer. Both have taught classes in technical documentation. 

The authors take you through all aspects of documenting Java APIs (application programming interfaces). They explain the different roles of different kinds of API documentation. For example, a programmer's guide and an API reference serve different purposes and complement each other.   

Though the authors focus on Java, much in the book applies to API programming for other languages. Buying the book entitles you to access additional information from an associated website, which contains sample projects that the book refers to. 

The authors write from the viewpoint of the person documenting the interfaces, but developers can get valuable insights from understanding that viewpoint. In many cases, developers provide the bulk of API documentation.

My connection with the authors makes me a biased reviewer, so I am hesitant to say too much about the book. I think I am safe, however, in saying that this is the only book on this subject. If you are involved in API documentation, you should definitely read it.

Communicating Design -- Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning by Daniel M Brown (New Riders, Berkeley CA, 2006, 368pp, ISBN 0-321-39235-3, www.newriders.com, $39.99)

Dan Brown is a web consultant who specializes in information architecture and user experience. He has written an unusual and valuable book. It is not about the mechanics of designing and implementing websites. Rather, it describes the artifacts that support clear communication among the designers and between the designers and their clients. Wireframes, site maps, flow charts, content inventories, personas, and other artifacts (known collectively as "the deliverables") provide the basis for this communication. 

The deliverables are independent of the design and development methodologies you choose to use. Using definitions, explanations, and clear pictures and diagrams, Brown shows how to produce and use these artifacts. If you are buying or selling websites, you should read this book.

CSS -- The Missing Manual by David Sawyer McFarland (Pogue, Sebastopol CA, 2006, 494pp, ISBN-13 978-0-596-52687-0, www.missingmanuals.com, $34.99)

David Sawyer McFarland is an author, a teacher, and a webmaster. He has designed many websites. Cascading style sheets (CSS) is a language that enables web designers to apply global styles to the raw HTML they use to encode the content of web pages.

When browsers and websites first became popular in the early 1990s, designers were forced to apply font size, color, and other elements of appearance directly to each HTML element (heading, paragraph, and so forth) that they created. There was no mechanism to ensure that every first level heading on a given page, let alone on the whole website, had the same appearance. Furthermore, HTML has only a limited number of ways to control appearance. Sophisticated visual designs required cumbersome misuse of HTML elements (for example, tables).

Designers soon recognized these defects, and CSS was born. But HTML was evolving rapidly, and CSS had a late start. It was not until recently that we had a version of CSS that designers could use effectively with their designs.

Using CSS is relatively simple, but it requires looking at design in a different way. McFarland explains this viewpoint, then goes on to show how to use each feature of CSS. He also starts with common design problems (for example, styling tables or forms) and shows how to use CSS to solve them.

The Missing Manual series of books fills the need for user centered documentation for many underdocumented products. This book does the same for CSS. 

Secrets of RSS by Steven Holzner (Peachpit, Berkeley CA, 2006, 344pp, ISBN 0-321-42622-3, www.peachpit.com, $24.99)

Steve Holzner is a prolific author of books about XML and related topics. RSS (really simple syndication) is, as the name suggests, a system for syndicating content. That is, it enables publishers to make content available in an XML format called an RSS feed. It enables subscribers to aggregate content into personal collections and read that content using a browser. Many web logs use RSS feeds to distribute content.

Following the excellent style of many books from this publisher, Holzner provides profusely illustrated step by step instructions for producing and consuming RSS feeds.

If your only interest in RSS is to be a subscriber, this book is more than you need. If you wish to publish, however, this book provides a clear view of everything you need to do.  

.NET Internationalization -- The Developer's Guide to Building Global Windows and Web Applications by Guy Smith-Ferrier (Addison-Wesley, Boston MA, 2007, 670pp, ISBN 0-321-34138-4, www.awprofessional.com, $49.99)

Internationalization is the process of preparing software to be easily translated (localized) for users who expect different languages, date formats, and other cultural conventions.

 

Guy Smith-Ferrier is a developer who specializes in internationalization. His book focuses on how to internationalize Windows Forms, ASP.NET applications, and other programs running in the .NET environment. 

Internationalization is not conceptually difficult, but it requires building and using a large and complex infrastructure. Fortunately for .NET developers, .NET includes such an infrastructure, so you don't have to build your own. This book teaches you how to use that infrastructure. If you develop applications in a .NET environment, you will sooner or later need to understand how it supports internationalization. This book is the place to start.

Weinberg on Writing, Knuth, Java to Ruby, DITA Intro

This article appears in slightly different form in the July/August 2006 issue of IEEE Micro © 2006 IEEE.

This article looks at old masters and new challengers.

Words from the Masters

In this section I look at works by two of the most respected and most prolific writers in the field of computer programming and beyond.

Weinberg on Writing -- The Fieldstone Method by Gerald M. Weinberg (Dorset House, New York NY, 2006, 208pp, ISBN 0-932633-65-X, www.dorsethouse.com, $24.95)

Gerald Weinberg has 40 published books to his credit, so I was eager to read about the techniques that work for him and have worked for many participants of his writing workshops. He describes his approach to writing as the fieldstone method. It derives from the first lesson he learned in college: only write about things you care about. As a result, he goes through life noticing what he cares about and making notes. These unordered notes are like the fieldstones you might collect to make a stone wall. He goes to great lengths to ensure that he can find these notes when he needs them. Then, when he decides that he wants to write about something, he gathers appropriate fieldstones and builds a book or essay the way a skilled stonemason would build a wall.

Building a wall requires you to select the right stones, organize them, and then assemble the wall -- trimming and polishing to make the best wall you can with what you have. Writing by the fieldstone method requires the analogous actions. Weinberg has developed principles and procedures for all of those actions. He describes them in this book, using frequent anecdotes and many exercises. These slow you down and keep you from skimming -- like the chunks of celery that make you chew your potato salad thoroughly.

Weinberg shows how his methods prevent writer's block, the paralyzing affliction that can lead writers into addictive behaviors that keep them from working for weeks at a time. He regards writer's block not as a disorder in you, the writer, but as a defect in your methods. It is natural to have too few or too many ideas. The problem comes from what you do about it. Weinberg tells you to ask yourself the Goldilocks question: is the number of ideas I have to work with too many, too few, or just right? Depending on the answer, you gather more ideas, dump some, or start trimming and polishing the ones you have.

Weinberg mixes his practical techniques with what we referred to as "new age" in the 1970s. One of his students writes that Weinberg offers intangibles like "motivating, raising self-esteem, building confidence in writing, considering self-other context, teaching the true meaning of discipline, thinking more clearly, and raising awareness." I'm sure this comes across more powerfully in his workshops, but it is amazing how much those intangibles come through in this short book.

Weinberg addresses the mechanics of selecting, organizing, trimming and polishing. Here he gives excellent advice, including some practical techniques for achieving the famous dictum of Strunk and White: omit needless words.

Weinberg addresses the difficult problem of knowing when to stop. The fieldstone method makes this easier than other approaches do. For example, if you start by developing an outline, you may be held up by even a minor point that you may not be able to provide right away. He likens it to waiting for the number that completes your card in a game of bingo. I thought of that analogy as I read Donald Knuth's latest contribution to his magnum opus, The Art of Computer Programming. 

Other authors are stopped by their desire for perfection or their fear of criticism. All of these seem silly in the context of building a fieldstone wall.

Weinberg provides useful anecdotes about his own experiences with publishers. The Psychology of Computer Programming was not his first book, but it was his first blockbuster. Aspiring writers may find it encouraging that Weinberg had difficulty finding a publisher who would take it. He persisted, and finally found a publisher. When I reread parts of that book recently, I remembered how radical they seemed in 1971. As I look around at today's programmers, I see that their underlying ethic and approach contain much that came from that book  -- even though few programmers have ever heard of it.

This summary is no substitute for reading the book. I have left out many good parts that are hard to summarize. For example, I'd like to steal the entire chapter on plagiarism. If you want or need to write, this book can help. It is full of practical advice that can help you succeed.

The Art of Computer Programming, Vol. 4, Fascicle 4 by Donald Knuth (Addison-Wesley, Reading MA, 2006, 128pp, ISBN 0-321-33570-8, www.awprofessional.com, $19.99)

Don Knuth received the ACM Turing award in 1974, became a Fellow of the British Computer society in 1980, was a charter recipient of the IEEE Computer Pioneer award in 1982, and received the J.D. Warnier prize for software methodology in 1989. He holds the unique title of emeritus professor of the art of computer programming at Stanford University.

When I reviewed the second edition of volume 3 of The Art of Computer Programming (Micro Review, Sept/Oct 1997), I compared the entire work to Herman Melville's Moby Dick. I did not mean that it constitutes an obsession on Knuth's part. Rather, it is, as Moby Dick is to students of literature, a work that you should study when you begin your career and reread as the years go by. Unfortunately, this is only partially possible. Though Knuth announced six volumes in 1969, he has to date completed only three, and there is no firm schedule for the rest. In fact, his greatest accomplishment, his single-handed design, programming, and documentation of the TeX system for document preparation, intervened. He spent many years developing that tool and then spent more years using TeX to "reimplement" the first three volumes.

Knuth has now devised a scheme for publishing the remainder of The Art of Computer Programming a little more quickly. Inspired by Charles Dickens, a nineteenth century English author who published novels in serial form, Knuth has begun to publish volume 4 in parts, or fascicles. In the last year he has brought out 4 such installments. The first fascicle, long-time Knuth fans will be delighted to hear, describes MMIX, an imaginary computer to replace the thirty-five year old MIX, the imaginary computer he used to describe algorithms in his original work. While MIX represented an idealized mixture of the assembly languages of 1960s era computers, MMIX is "A RISC Computer for the New Millennium."

Volume 4, as originally announced in 1969, covers combinatorial algorithms. Fascicles 2 and 3 deal with generating tuples, permutations, combinations, and partitions. These lead up to fascicle 4, which deals with generating trees. This fascicle also reviews the history of generating combinatorial patterns. For example, King Wen devised the I Ching in 1143 BC, and it is still a bestseller today. It has 64 chapters, corresponding to 64 hexagrams in which each of the six lines has one of two values -- yin or yang.

I can't in good conscience urge you to rush out and buy this book (unless you're a librarian). Aside from designers of searching algorithms, most people will not find it directly relevant to their work. Nonetheless, it is important as part of a coherent encyclopedia of computer science. And there is the added incentive that Knuth will pay you $2.56 for each typo that you find.  

Like the monks moving the Tower of Hanoi, Knuth soldiers on. I hope he lives long and prospers, and I hope he never finishes.

Challengers

Our industry has many stories of challenges to accepted ways of doing things. Some of the challenged leaders lost their positions. Others held on. Here are books about new technologies that challenge accepted leaders.

From Java to Ruby -- Things Every Manager Should Know by Bruce Tate (Pragmatic Bookshelf, Raleigh NC, 2006, 164pp, ISBN 0-9766940-9-3, www.pragmaticprogrammer.com, $29.95)

Bruce Tate is a consultant specializing in persistence and lightweight development in Java and Ruby. He is the author of the award winning Better, Faster, Lighter Java and a number of other books. He wrote this book for managers, or for developers who are advising managers, who are considering moving some development projects from Java to Ruby.

Java has come a long way since its introduction eleven years ago. In the May/June 1996 Micro Review, I described the design processes by which C++ and Java put themselves forth as object-oriented successors to C. I also wrote at the time:

I think Java will eventually replace C, but I think C++ will persist as its competitor for a long time. That conflict will probably follow the model of the RISC vs CISC wars, so that ten years from now it will be hard to know which is which.

Those ten years have gone by, and Java has acquired a lot of the complexity of C++, especially in the competing frameworks that developers must evaluate and learn to use. Meanwhile, a number of more nimble languages have acquired large communities of users. According to Tate, one of those languages, Ruby, in the form of the Ruby on Rails framework, presents a better solution than Java for an important class of problems: database-backed web applications.

Tate makes the point that moving to a new computer language is risky in many ways. You should not consider it unless you see serious problems with your current situation. Tate suggests that you consider Java's greater complexity and lower productivity as risks to be balanced against the risks of moving to Ruby. He sees a large part of Java's complexity as coming from the various frameworks that Java programmers must use. He compares this with the simplicity and productivity of Rails.

Tate presents other arguments and provides greater detail. He doesn't try to decide for you, but if you decide to try Ruby, Tate provides detailed strategies for migrating and for coexisting with Java. Tate acknowledges that not everybody agrees with his point of view. He has a pro-Ruby bias, but he presents the arguments on both sides. He includes the comments of many industry experts, most notably Martin Fowler, who are frustrated with Java's deficiencies. 

If you are seriously considering a change of this sort, you should read Tate's book carefully. 

Introduction to DITA -- A User Guide to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture by Jennifer Linton and Kylene Bruski (Comtech, Denver CO, 2006, 348pp, ISBN 0-9778634-0-9, www.comtech-serv.com, $50.00)

Most software products require some sort of documentation, above and beyond what the bare user interface provides. Providing that documentation has traditionally been the task of technical writers. Those writers produced manuals: printed or online books that covered the subject sequentially. 

Over the last ten to fifteen years, many movements have converged upon a model of documentation that throws away the book. In this model, writers write topics -- atomic pieces of information that they recombine as needed and present to users online on demand. Users press a help button specific to the task they are working on or use indexes, tables of contents, or search engines to find the topics they need. Topics typically describe procedures, but they can also explain concepts or provide reference information.

As this model has developed, writers have tried to achieve its goals by using the available book-oriented tools. In the area of structured writing, this meant using the Docbook system, which was originally developed in the 1980s to work with SGML (Standard General Markup Language, an ancestor of XML). The Docbook DTD (document type definition) is in widespread use with XML publishing tools today.

Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) marks a clean break with the book model. Its designers at IBM started from topics. They introduced a system of maps to take the place of the structure imposed by a book. Maps externalize dependencies and cross references, which facilitates automated recombination and reuse of topics.

Until now, there have been few organized presentations about DITA for writers. Linton and Bruski try to fill that need. They build the book around a complete online help system developed in DITA from the ground up. If you work your way through it, you will learn how all the pieces fit together. 

Unfortunately, the book does show signs of the speed with which it has been brought to market. Its structure is a combination of parts, sections, and lessons, but no chapters. It appears to superimpose a book's outer trappings onto a set of lecture notes and lab instructions. Also, the editing leaves a lot to be desired.

If you are in a hurry to understand DITA, this book can help. If not, you might want to wait for the second edition.

More on Old Topics

This article appears in slightly different form in the May/June 2006 issue of IEEE Micro © 2006 IEEE.

This time I look at interesting books on subjects I have touched on in recent reviews.

Globalization

The books in this section give interesting perspectives on the dark side of globalization.

In Defense of Globalization by Jagdish Bhagwati (Oxford, New York NY, 2005, 320pp, ISBN-13 978-0-19-530003-1, www.oup.com, $15.95)

Jagdish Bhagwati is a Columbia University economist. His 1993 book, India in Transition, detailed problems with the bureaucracy that had grown up in the decades after India's independence from Britain. The reforms that he endorsed in that book have contributed greatly to India's rapid economic advance in recent years.

This book is a paperback edition of his widely acclaimed 2004 book about globalization. In it he answers the critics of globalization who point to its dark side. Bhagwati argues that many of these criticisms are exaggerated or simply wrong.

Bhagwati begins by recognizing that the discussion of this subject is often highly emotional, with fears masquerading as evidence and neither side listening to the other. He listens carefully to the anti-globalization advocates, articulates their concerns, and then addresses those concerns. In particular, many critics claim that globalization lacks a human face. By this they mean that economic globalization has adverse social consequences. Bhagwati rejects this notion but still addresses the social concerns that the critics cite. As he puts it, he discusses "the design of institutional changes, both domestic and international, that are necessary to make the generally good effects of globalization even better."

Bhagwati's stature as an economist and his careful arguments make his rosy view believable. If you wish to hear an informed argument for the benefits of globalization, this is the book to read. 

Globalization and Its Enemies by Daniel Cohen (MIT, Cambridge MA, 2006, 256pp, ISBN 0-262-03350-X, mitpress.mit.edu, $27.95)

Daniel Cohen is a professor of economics at the École Normale Supérieure, an economic advisor to the French prime minister, and an op-ed columnist for Le Monde. Like Thomas Friedman in The World Is Flat (Micro Review, May/June 2005), Cohen sees todays globalization as the third wave of a process that began with the Spanish conquistidors.

Globalization has not usually brought wealth. India was just as poor in 1913 as it was in 1820. Globalization has also brought terrible consequences, but these have often been completely unintentional. Cohen cites Germaine Tillion's account of the impoverishment of an Algerian village as a result of French actions to eradicate malaria and typhoid and to reduce the village's isolation. Twenty years later, the lack of disease had led to a population explosion. Shepherds increased the size of their flocks, destroying the soil. The roads to the outside allowed some people to become richer by exporting their sheep, while others grew poorer. The traditional societal values disappeared.

According to Cohen, the enemies of globalization fall into two camps: those who decry the westernization of the world and those who see it as a battle in the global class struggle. Both camps share the view that globalization imposes a model that people do not want. But Cohen believes the opposite. Global communication lets people all over the world see the films and television programs of the wealthy nations. Many wish to share in the lifestyle those programs depict, but they see no way to do so.

Cohen sees globalization as proceeding efficiently in the northern hemisphere but not in the southern. He cites Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (Norton, 1996) to explain why this is true.

One of the most contentious issues in globalization is intellectual property. For example, the global AIDS epidemic is manageable in the north but runs rampant in the south. The difference is the general availability in the north of drugs to control the disease. Intellectual property laws make these drugs difficult to obtain in the impoverished south.

This small book contains many interesting ideas and uncommon points of view. I recommend it.  

Database Design

The Art of SQL by Stéphane Faroult with Peter Robson (O'Reilly, Sebastopol CA, 2006, 367pp, ISBN 0-596-00894-5, www.oreilly.com, $44.99)

SQL (no longer an acronym) is the standard language for posing queries to databases. Faroult is a database consultant who has worked on query performance issues for more than 20 years. He regards each new performance challenge as a battle to be fought against an army of database rows. He titled his book as an allusion to Sun Tzu's Art of War. He hopes to pass on his "battlefield" experience to help you write good SQL code. He carries the battle metaphor into his text. For example,

The way that we have to attack that data depends on the circumstances and conditions under which we have to fight the battle. Our attack will depend on the amount of data from which we retrieve our result set and on our forces (the filtering criteria), together with the volume of the data to be retrieved.

Faroult takes you through all of the aspects of performance tuning -- from creating a good design to working with a bad one. He covers a set of standard SQL situations and describes patterns to handle them. He even explains the basic idea of relational databases and shows how using the model correctly can result in code that performs well.

Occasionally, Faroult breaks out a principle and displays it with an owl icon. Examples include the following:

• A confused query can confuse the optimizer. Clarity and suggested joins can help the optimizer provide good performance.
• To reduce the sensitivity of queries to increases in the volume of data, operate only on the data that is strictly necessary at the deeper levels of a query. Keep ancillary joins for the outer level.
• There is no need to code explicitly what the database performs implicitly.     

Tuning the performance of database applications can be a dull subject. Faroult presents it in an interesting way. If you write database applications and you've never studied performance tuning, you should read this book.

Interaction Design

In the Sept/Oct 2000 Micro Review, I looked at Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. That book presents the business case for a proposed new profession called interaction design. At that time Cooper promised a subsequent book to explain how to do interaction design.

About Face 2.0 -- The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper & Robert Reimann (Wiley, Indianapolis IN, 2003, 504pp, ISBN 0-7645-2641-3, www.wiley.com/compbooks, $35.00)

In 1992 Alan Cooper gave up programming to devote himself to making products easier to use. The first fruit of this effort is his highly regarded book, About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design (IDG, 1995). 

While Cooper believes that the design principles in About Face are right, he has decided that the audience is wrong. The book starts from the premise that programmers, by default, do most user interface design. As a result, Cooper talks primarily to them, trying to help them design good interfaces. Unfortunately, however, even though programmers would like to design good interfaces, they don't have the time, and often don't have the skills to do so. Moreover, programmers face an overwhelming conflict of interest. 

Competitive demands force programmers to push their systems and their tools beyond their limits. To survive, they must simplify the development process. Making programs easy to use conflicts with making development easy. Programmers have no time to develop  interfaces that mirror users' views of the task. They choose an easy-to-develop interface that mirrors the program's inner workings. Programmers understand the interfaces that result, so they don't see why those interfaces confuse and frustrate users.

The subtitle of the 2.0 version shows the change of audience. Now he is writing for interaction designers. The 3.0 version will be for the same audience, but with more emphasis on online interactions.

This book is much too dense to summarize. The authors present a comprehensive view of the strategy and tactics of designing software that focuses on the needs of users. If you'd like your software to focus on the needs of your users, you probably have a long row to hoe. Reading this book would be a good first step.

Media

Deep Time of the Media -- Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means by Siegfried Zielinski (MIT, Cambridge MA, 2006, 304pp, ISBN 0-262-24049-1, mitpress.mit.edu, $33.95)

Zielinski is a professor of media and communication studies. In this book he describes a field of his own invention: media archaeology. 

The highly respected science writer John McPhee coined the term "deep time" as an analog to deep space (Basin and Range, 1981). It refers to things so long ago that our brains cannot grasp the magnitude of the interval. We are in deep time when we consider the age of the Earth or the lengths of geological ages. To this concept, Stephen Jay Gould added another dimension that represents biological diversity (Wonderful Life, 1991). Zielinski's deep time of the media is relative to internet time. From that standpoint, the 1500s are ancient. That is where his archaeological investigations begin. The book describes his digging methods and the discoveries he unearthed. A collection of skulls of female Italian criminals seems to have little to do with what we think of these days as "the media," but Zielinski connects them and their collector, Lambroso, to early twentieth century films.

With nearly a hundred pages of notes, bibliography, and index, this is an academic book. Its dry style follows the standard for such books. Yet, Zielinski manages to convey the excitement of finding the turning points that push media history in one direction rather than another. The fascinating illustrations make the book pleasant to page through. 

The Singularity is Near, My Job Went to India

This article appears in slightly different form in the January/February 2006 issue of IEEE Micro © 2006 IEEE.

The Future Will Be Here Soon

This time I look at two books that deal with adapting to trends. One conjectures about how we will adapt to the accelerating pace of technology when that pace outstrips our biological limitations. The other provides sound advice for dealing with an immediate situation, the globalization of technology-based commerce.   

The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil (Viking, New York NY, 2005, 672pp, ISBN 0-670-03384-7, $29.95)

When Ray Kurzweil wrote his first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines (MIT, 1990), he brought to it a history of more than twenty years of creating successful artificial intelligence (AI) applications. As a high school student in the 1960s, he appeared on the TV program I've Got a Secret and played a piece of music that his homemade computer had composed. At MIT, he used AI techniques to match high school students with potential colleges. After graduating, he developed optical character recognition software, reading machines for the blind, and computer-based musical instruments. All of these developments became commercial successes.

Kurzweil's second book, The Age of Spiritual Machines (Viking, 1999) enters the philosophical debate about consciousness, feelings, and whether machines can exhibit these essential human characteristics. Kurzweil's view is that they might not do so now, but it's only a matter of time. That brings us to the current book.

The singularity that Kurzweil refers to occurs at a time, perhaps a few decades from now, when the exponential growth of technology will seem nearly vertical to those of us who are still limited by our biology. The accelerating rate of change in our society is a commonplace. We have been accommodating it for centuries, but it has gotten harder lately. The only way that most of us can keep up is by depending upon such manifestations of computer technology as cell phones, instant messaging, search engines, and electronic mail. Kurzweil believes that the rate of change will continue to grow and that our dependence on technology will evolve into something much more profound.

By Kurzweil's definition, you are a singularitarian if you understand the singularity and have reflected on its consequences for your life. Charlie Kam captured the essence of this book by adapting a Gilbert & Sullivan song (from Pirates of Penzance, 1879):

I am the very model of a Singularitarian 

I'm combination Transhuman, Immortalist, Extropian, 

Aggressively I’m changing all my body’s biochemistry 

Because my body's heritage is obsolete genetically, 

Replacing all the cells each month it's here just temporarily 

The pattern of my brain and body’s where there's continuity, 

I'll try to improve these patterns with optimal biology, 

(“But how will I do that? I need to be smarter. Ah, yes…”) 

I’ll expand my mental faculties by merging with technology, . . .

You can read the lyrics and listen to the whole song by following a link from www.KurzweilAI.net.

Kurzweil attributes much of his commercial success to his ability to predict and adapt to future technological capabilities. Even if you don't believe Kurzweil's conclusions, this book gives an insight into the kinds of research and reasoning he uses to make such predictions. He extrapolates trends in innovation, fabrication, and even software development to conclude that if we can keep ourselves alive until the singularity, we will live for an indefinitely long time. Doing this, as the Charlie Kam song suggests, requires us to understand life and consciousness differently from the way most people view these manifestations of life today.

When Scottie beams Captain Kirk up, Kirk dematerializes where he is and reappears on the starship Enterprise. Each of his atoms is destroyed and the information from that atom is used to produce a corresponding atom on the starship. The Captain Kirk who is now on the starship has complete recall of the adventure from which he just returned. The singularitarian of the song has similarly been "beamed up" to a new, better hardware platform that can more effectively support the patterns that define his identity. That new hardware platform will enable him to leave Earth and spread human intelligence, which will then be growing at a vastly increased rate, throughout the universe.

Leaving aside any reservations we might have about the desirability or details of this scenario, we also have to consider the possibility that negative forces might push the future in a different direction. In his April 2000 Wired Magazine article, The Future Does Not Need Us (Micro Review, July/August 2000), Bill Joy points out that humanity, so far, has muddled through the problems of technological change. But technology is becoming more powerful, more potentially destructive, and more widely accessible. The chance that humanity will survive its side effects, accidental consequences, or malicious misuse, drops from the near certainty of the past to a lower, more frightening, level.

Joy considers three technologies in which our progress is quickly outpacing our ability to control them: genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR). He calls attention to some of the possible consequences of these technologies -- plague, intelligent germ warfare, out-of-control self-replicating robots, and many others. Some of the consequences seem highly unlikely. Others seem likely. Many are potentially catastrophic, perhaps even fatal, to humanity.

Kurzweil and Joy agree on the dangers, but they disagree on how to deal with them. Joy's proposal is to restrict GNR work until we have mechanisms in place to prevent bad consequences. Kurzweil's approach is to accelerate GNR work in order to avert catastrophes and solve humanity's problems.

Kurzweil dedicates a substantial portion of his book to answering objections like Bill Joy's. These objections have come in response to his earlier books and to earlier expressions of the ideas in this one. I found it very interesting to read these objections and Kurzweil's answers.

Whatever you think about the promise and dangers of the advance of technology, you can learn a lot by reading this book.

My Job Went to India: 52 Ways to Save Your Job by Chad Fowler (Pragmatic Bookshelf, Raleigh NC, 2005, 196pp, ISBN 0-9766940, www.PragmaticProgrammer.com, $19.95)

Chad Fowler is a programmer who has lived and worked in both India and America as an employee of large multinational companies. Like Tom Friedman in The World Is Flat (Micro Review, May/June 2005), Fowler says that the way for U S workers to contend with a global marketplace in information technology is to take steps, individually and as a country, to make themselves more competitive. This book focuses on the steps that workers can take individually.

Incidentally, Ed Miracle, the painter who created the original cover art (dropped in later editions because of a copyright dispute) for Tom Friedman's The World Is Flat, has just brought out another delightful lithograph called Intelligent Design. It is subtle and should not offend people on either side of that controversy. You can order it from www.miraclesart.com/.

  

Fowler does not bash Indian workers. He admires their hard work and determination. Friedman, delighting in a pun and a cultural statement, offers approaches to make you untouchable. Fowler does not have Friedman's global view, but he is far more knowledgable than Friedman about the everyday realities of being a programmer. Like Friedman, he knows that American workers cannot compete solely on price. He offers 52 short but detailed ideas about how to compete globally.

While Fowler's book is informed by his experiences in India and America, much of his advice would have been just as valid twenty years ago. The boom in information technology leading up to 2000 made it easy for American workers to ignore the fundamentals and still do well. This book calls for a return to fundamentals. Fowler wants you to view your career as an exercise in creating and selling a product. To be successful at this you must choose your marketplace, then invest in, build, and market your product.

The first 41 of Fowler's 52 ways to save your job tie directly to these four tasks. The remainder are along the lines of Stephen Covey's seventh habit of highly successful people: sharpen the saw (Micro Review, Sept/Oct 2002). That is, they help you keep your edge.

Fowler recognizes that collaboration is a key competency for anyone who wishes to compete in the global marketplace. He berates the fears that make some American workers reluctant to share their wisdom with their Indian counterparts. Companies that have such internal distrust between their American and Indian teams are less effective, and ultimately less successful, than companies in which the teams work together.

Fowler's 52 essays are down to earth and uncompromising. You can't make things better if you don't assess the current state of affairs honestly. Most essays conclude with a list of ways to act on what you learned. These are small but important tasks. You can accomplish them in a reasonable length of time, and they take you outside the daily routine that can lead to long term decline. 

For example, in one of his essays Fowler points out that even if you are on the bleeding edge of the current wave, you're probably behind on the next one. The action item at the end of that essay calls for you to carve out two hours each week to research new technologies and start to develop skills in them.

Another example is an essay in which Fowler points to the open source movement as a model for solving many of the collaboration problems that arise within multinational teams. The action item at the end of that essay is to get involved in an open source project to help you learn how to collaborate.

Fowler calls The Pragmatic Programmer by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt (Micro Review, Jan/Feb 2000) a catalyst for his career. The current book follows that excellent model in providing a pragmatic approach to dealing with globalization. You should read it.

Year End Cleanup

This article appears in slightly different form in the November/December 2005 issue of IEEE Micro © 2005 IEEE.

I see far more books than I have time to write adequate reviews of. This time, I point you to a number of books that I hope I'll have time to do justice to some day. Experience tells me, however, that some day rarely comes. More books come in, and other priorities intervene, so I'll probably never get back to these. But they are too promising to pass by without comment.

 

Programming Practices

Prefactoring -- Extreme Abstraction, Extreme Separation, Extreme Readability by Ken Pugh (O'Reilly, Sebastopol CA, 2005, 238pp, ISBN 0-596-00874-0, www.oreilly.com, $29.95)

Refactoring entails changing the internal structure of code without changing its external behavior. The objective might be to make the code more maintainable or to accommodate an extension. Pugh uses his experience of refactoring to arrive at prefactoring, that is, design principles that anticipate these objectives. Using prefactoring principles can reduce the need for refactoring, thus saving time and effort later in the project.

Of course, many books on programming style have stressed the need for maintainability and extensibility. Some of them predate extreme programming, refactoring, design patterns, or even object oriented programming by many years. What distinguishes Pugh's book is that he assumes that you will be using object oriented programming and many of the design and testing principles that characterize extreme programming. I find it interesting to compare this book to Joshua Bloch's Effective Java (Micro Review Jul/Aug 2002). They are both about writing better code, but Pugh's book is not so intimately tied to a specific computer language. It focuses on the entire development process, not just the code, and it does so within the context of specific application problems.

Pugh illustrates his principles with an example that he follows through most of the book. He invents a client, Sam, who runs a lawnmower and music CD rental business. Pugh and his partner, Tim, work with Sam and each other to provide a system for keeping track of rentals.

Here is one example of a design issue that comes up in Pugh's imagined work with Sam. After the system design has advanced sufficiently to have a class representing customers and a class representing music CDs, Sam introduces new requirements that mean that the system should know which customers have rented a certain CD and which CDs have been rented by a certain customer. Rather than keeping that information in one class or the other, Pugh introduces the principle Decouple with Associations. This leads to association classes that keep track of each coupling of a customer and a CD for a specific period of time.

I was delighted to find that Pugh advocates a design principle that has been around for a long time. Pugh states his principle as Separate Policy from Implementation. I don't remember the source, but in the 1960s, that principle took the form don't build policy into the code.

Pugh advocates one principle that I understand but dislike. He likes highly specific method names, such as read_line_up_to_new_line_and_toss_new_line, so that you don't have to look at the method to see what it does. For the same reason, he doesn't like overloaded methods. By using unique names, you can make the methods describe themselves.

Pugh has had a long career and has lots of wisdom to share. This short book will definitely repay the time you spend reading it. 

Core Security Patterns -- Best Practices and Strategies for J2EE, Web Services, and Identity Management by Christopher Steel, Ramesh Nagappan, and Ray Lai (Prentice Hall PTR, Upper Saddle River NJ, 2005, 1088pp, ISBN 0-13-146307-1, www.phptr.com/smp, $59.99)

I started reviewing books in the Sun Microsystems Press Java series from Prentice Hall almost ten years ago. These books are comprehensive and authoritative, and this one is especially so. Christopher Steel is a well known security consultant. He was chief architect of the United States Treasury's Pay.gov project. His co-authors are software systems architects at Sun. They specialize in the technologies that underlie effective security.

The underlying message of the book is that you must build security into your applications. The current widespread practice of adding security after the fact is the cause of many of the security nightmares we are all familiar with. Building security into applications means using successful patterns and technologies. Of course, even before that, it means understanding the security issues that can arise in the kinds of networked applications that our society depends upon.

This book describes the problems to be addressed in the various application layers, explains the patterns and best practices that can help you address those problems, and points to the technologies you can use to implement the resulting strategies. The authors show you how to transform a chaotic and intractable problem into one that is difficult but manageable.

If you are involved in any way with enterprise software, this book belongs on your shelf.

C# Precisely by Peter Sestof & Henrik I. Hansen (MIT, Cambridge MA, 2005, 214pp, ISBN 0-262-69317-8, mitpress.mit.edu, $19.95)

If you have used Java Precisely (now in its second edition) by Peter Sestof, then you know what to expect from this book. It is a reference, not a textbook. Most of the brief reference sections have accompanying code examples. 

As I look at the two books side by side, I find it interesting that C# Precisely is almost twice as thick as Java Precisely. I'll let you draw your own conclusions from that.

If you already know C# but want to look up the rules and see a code example for, say, explicit interface member implementations, all in about half a page, this is the book for you.

Communicating

Reviewing PDF Documents in Acrobat -- Visual QuickProject Guide by Donna L. Baker (Peachpit, Berkeley CA, 2005, 126pp, ISBN 0-321-32119-7, www.peachpit.com, $12.99)

Peachpit's Visual QuickStart and Visual QuickProject guides are a marvelous resource for visual learners. If you find that a picture is better than a thousand words, this series of books is for you.

This book follows a simple Adobe Acrobat use case: Create a PDF file representing a document that you plan to publish. Invite reviewers to annotate the file with their comments. Read and evaluate the comments, and incorporate them into a final version.

Many people already do this, but gingerly and minimally, because they have only learned a few essential Acrobat features. Baker covers all of the Acrobat features that pertain to this task. If you'd like to use Acrobat and PDF more effectively to facilitate your review process, and if you're a visual learner, you should read this book.

No Nonsense XML Web Development with PHP by Thomas Meyer (Sitepoint, Melbourne Australia, 2005, 368pp, ISBN 0-9752402-0-X, www.sitepoint.com, $39.95)

Thomas Meyer is a consultant who specializes in developing dynamic websites that use XML and databases to manage the underlying content. He envisions his audience for this book as "intelligent and curious, with a wide range of technical proficiency, but all feeling a little overwhelmed by the terminology, processes, and technologies surrounding XML." 

Meyer uses the book to develop an XML-powered website, while teaching you what you need to know about XML. The "no nonsense" part of the title refers to the fact that he leaves out many important aspects of XML that don't pertain directly to the task at hand. For example, he talks about document type definitions (DTDs) but not XML schemas. He talks a lot about Xpath, but says nothing about Xquery or Xlink.

If you work your way through this book, you will understand how to use XML and PHP to manage the content of a website. You will also have a sound basis from which to explore other aspects of XML as you expand your website's capabilities.

Document Engineering -- Analyzing and Designing Documents for Business Informatics and Web Services by Robert J. Glushko  Tim McGrath (MIT, Cambridge MA, 2005, 724pp, ISBN 0-262-07261-0, mitpress.mit.edu, $34.00)

Robert Glushko leads the Center for Document Engineering at UC Berkeley. Tim McGrath is an independent consultant and chair of an Oasis Universal Business Language subcommittee.

This book is at the opposite pole from the "no nonsense" book I review elsewhere in this column. It treats its subject exhaustively and abstractly in a way that will surely prove daunting to most potential readers.

While many people use the phrase document engineering, Glushko and McGrath define it as an approach, not a methodology. They see Document Engineering as a discipline, defined by this book, that applies equally to documents that carry data between business applications and documents that carry information or instructions to human readers in a business context.

As best I can tell, this book describes an approach to designing loosely coupled message-driven business systems, with special emphasis on the messages. The successful document engineer, according to the authors, can come from any discipline that teaches people to think abstractly and reason about information and processes. If this sounds like something you're interested in, then consider buying this book. 

Living on the Web

Ambient Findability by Peter Morville (O'Reilly, Sebastopol CA, 2005, 204pp, ISBN 0-596-00765-5, www.oreilly.com, $29.95)

In The World is Flat (Micro Review, May/June 2005), Tom Friedman lists in-forming as one of his ten flatteners. By this term Friedman refers to the powerful search tools that make huge amounts of information quickly available on demand. Friedman glosses over this flattener, but Peter Morville delves deeply into it.

The biggest problem with this book is figuring out exactly what it's about. Jakob Nielsen says in a blurb on the back cover that it puts search engine marketing into a larger context and provides insights into human behavior. The author says in his preface that he doesn't know what the book is about or whom it's for. He asks you to read it, then send a copy to anyone who should read it. 

If you want to understand how networks and ubiquitous computing are changing our world, read this book. You may not be able to summarize it, but it will give you a lot of information quickly and painlessly.

The Symantec Guide to Home Internet Security by Andrew Conry-Murray & Vincent Weafer (Addison-Wesley, Boston MA, 2005, 240pp, ISBN 0-321-35641-1, www.awprofessional.com, $19.99)

We all love the convenience of being connected to the vast resources of a networked world, but that convenience is increasingly balanced by danger. Many of us will never be security experts. We have a few tools that we rely on for our personal business, entertainment, and communication. They come out of the box with a variety of protections, and they continually update themselves. Nonetheless, there are still risks, and most of us have no idea how to assess, mitigate against, or devise contingency plans for those risks.

The authors, a writer and a security researcher, offer this book as "a comprehensive resource for the broad range of risks that Internet users face." If you use computers in your personal life, you should look at this book.

The eBay Survival Guide -- How to Make Money and Avoid Losing Your Shirt by Michael Banks (No Starch, San Francisco CA, 2005, 284pp, ISBN 1-59327-063-1, www.nostarch.com, $19.95)

More that a hundred million people have used eBay, the online auction site. There is a tremendous potential benefit from buying or selling there. Many people do so successfully with no formal training, but a few tips and tricks can be worth hundreds of dollars.

This book assumes that you can figure out how to navigate the site and handle the mechanics of buying and selling. It focuses, according to the publisher, on "how to get the best price if you're selling; how not to overpay; and how not to get ripped off."